Have you ever played a game, and despite hours of blasting the bad guys left and right and stopping every nefarious scheme, the villain reveals their reasoning and you thought to yourself, "Dude, that's a fair a point. I actually agree that what you're doing is probably right, sign me up!"

Now this isn't simply about villains with sympathetic backstories that make you feel they are justified in their anger, I am honestly talking about villains who you actually agree that what they are doing is probably for the better good of all the parties involved despite the villains going about it through unnecessarily violent means.

LunarWeaver

07-05-2017, 02:20 PM

Handsome Jack from the Borderlands games. Pandora is an absolute mess and he wants to clean it up. He does it through bad means unfortunately.

Also Kai Leng from Mass Effect 3 just to make Psychotic mad.

Rez09

07-06-2017, 08:50 AM

Dhaos in Tales of Phantasia, specifically past Dhaos, as the whole reason he starts his war with Midgards is to prevent the development and use of magitech weaponry, which he believes will ultimately kill the planet's (rather important) world tree -- and he isn't wrong either, as Aselia is already on the way out in the present where the player starts, as indicated by the dead / dying Yggdrasill and absence of magic.

KleinerKiller

07-06-2017, 09:59 AM

Revolver Ocelot in the MGS games, specifically MGS4. He may have recruited scores of psychopaths and misguided torture victims, personally and indirectly killed a lot of people, and sneered and snarked at Snake the whole way through, but he's ultimately doing the world a huge favor by waging his war against the Patriots. A brief societal collapse is a paltry price to pay for being freed of your insane, long-malfunctioning A.I. overlords.

The Shadowlord in Nier. Dude's genuinely just trying to stop some out-of-control synthetic beings who think they're humans (sympathetic or not, regardless) from obliviously slaughtering the actual human race. He's the mostly unambiguous hero of the story. And for a guy whose life and identity have basically been stolen wholesale by his doppelganger, he's still remarkably calm and professional about what he has to do up until the player brings it all tumbling down toward the end.

Sephiroth

07-06-2017, 09:14 PM

The Shadowlord in Nier. Dude's genuinely just trying to stop some out-of-control synthetic beings who think they're humans (sympathetic or not, regardless) from obliviously slaughtering the actual human race. He's the mostly unambiguous hero of the story. And for a guy whose life and identity have basically been stolen wholesale by his doppelganger, he's still remarkably calm and professional about what he has to do up until the player brings it all tumbling down toward the end.

I have said it often and will say it again: Except the replicants are humans, or lifeforms so to speak, nonetheless. It does not matter what Popola and Devola told them. They are clones that are connected to the Gestalts. And they have not asked to live. It just happened. And the Gestalts can't just go out and steal those bodies just because long ago they were made for them - even worse, other than Nier Replicant the Gestalts as well as the original Nier were aware of whom the Gestalts attacked but they did not care. The Gestalts were incredibly hypocritical. "Oh, oh. Look at us. We are so much to be pitied. That horrible man will come and kill us", they say while animating the bodies of the clones already meaning they take away the life of the clones (and psychologically spoken, what we really are, our existence is the consciousness/ego and they just like Yonah Gestalt did, live in a body were they are conscious now while the others are powerless or maybe don't even exist anymore). Shadowlord Nier does not have a single point except for saving Yonah. And his own Yonah was the only one to understand that the Replicants also had a right to live a life. They gained consciousness and started to live. Seeing them as 2nd class entities that can be killed "because they are no normal humans and they were not supposed to live in those bodies" is THE TRULY inhuman way of thinking. Yonah Gestalt sacrificing herself was one of the most impressive moves ever. There is only one thing were Shadowlord Nier is to be pitied and that is his desire to help Yonah, just like his clone also wants to help his own Yonah. Sympathise with the Shadowlord or not but he is far from being the "most uambigious hero". Just like his clone he would do everything. And by the end of the day HE was the one who started taking away the other one's Yonah, not vice-versa. Just because "they were their bodies in the first place". No. They weren't. Not the moment a psychological instance of life was formed in that body. It can never be a healthy way and a way to be proud of to think that one lifeform is worth less than the other one. Whether they were conceived naturally or created to serve as shells and then suddenly started to live, it does not matter. Both Niers are totally to be understood. And the really impressive one is Yonah Gestalt.

That said I still feel for Nier Gestalt. Same goes for others in similiar positions like Caius Ballad.

Fox

07-06-2017, 10:27 PM

I don't think there are many villains at all who I think 'had a point'. In games they tend to throw away any sense of ambiguity by the time you reach the end. Even someone like Artorius, who starts out with a damn good point, ends up taking things to such extremes you can no longer consider his views seriously. I'm really struggling to think of any games where there is a legitimate battle of ideology, where it's kinda ambiguous if you're on the right side or not. Sometimes you get a villain with a good idea somewhere, but then they take it to such an extreme they lose all their credibility.

You know what? I... I'm gonna say Vayne Solidor.

Sure, he was selfish and power hungry. But he also wanted to take power away from the mysterious Occuria and put mankind in control of their own destiny. Becoming the new Dynast-King wasn't really over the top supervillainry in his case; it was a necessity to take control of history away from the Occuria.

Wolf Kanno

07-06-2017, 10:31 PM

When I was making this thread, I was thinking of the villains from MGS2 actually. I could easily back Solidus' plans to stop the Patriots, but funny enough, I can't really argue with the what the Patriots were doing as well, because hot damn people use the internet for mostly trivial dumb shit and I do sometimes wondering if the lack of filters is culturally dumbing down society in some ways.

Fox

07-06-2017, 10:36 PM

When I was making this thread, I was thinking of the villains from MGS2 actually. I could easily back Solidus' plans to stop the Patriots, but funny enough, I can't really argue with the what the Patriots were doing as well, because hot damn people use the internet for mostly trivial dumb trout and I do sometimes wondering if the lack of filters is culturally dumbing down society in some ways.

NO I'M....isn't... :shifty:

I do think MGS 2 and 3 are both full of good candidates depending on who you count as a villain.

Skyblade

07-07-2017, 04:51 PM

When I was making this thread, I was thinking of the villains from MGS2 actually. I could easily back Solidus' plans to stop the Patriots, but funny enough, I can't really argue with the what the Patriots were doing as well, because hot damn people use the internet for mostly trivial dumb trout and I do sometimes wondering if the lack of filters is culturally dumbing down society in some ways.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Once you start putting in place filters to "protect the culture", who decides what gets filtered out, and why? The censorship route doesn't end well.

And, frankly, the exact same things have been said about every other form of media, from comic books to games to novels to opera.

Wolf Kanno

07-07-2017, 07:10 PM

When I was making this thread, I was thinking of the villains from MGS2 actually. I could easily back Solidus' plans to stop the Patriots, but funny enough, I can't really argue with the what the Patriots were doing as well, because hot damn people use the internet for mostly trivial dumb trout and I do sometimes wondering if the lack of filters is culturally dumbing down society in some ways.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Once you start putting in place filters to "protect the culture", who decides what gets filtered out, and why? The censorship route doesn't end well.

And, frankly, the exact same things have been said about every other form of media, from comic books to games to novels to opera.

Sadly my general misanthrope nature makes me feel the ends justify the means in this case, though as I mentioned in the post, I was also rooting for Solidus, I simply also agreed that the Patriots made a good point about why they were doing what they were doing. At the time of the game's release, I felt the Patriots were easily in the wrong, but fifteen years later, and watching where the internet and social media have gone, makes me feel that the Patriots concerns were completely valid. We squander this technology on useless nonsense instead of pushing ourselves forward with it.

Værn

07-08-2017, 07:45 PM

My D&D groups storyteller is very good at doing this. The end boss we've been building up to for forever is a devil and quite explicitly evil, but the encounters leading up to that point are very questionable.

My favorite example, of course, is the lich. The wizard Sation made a pact with our devil, but the devil twisted the deal and committed horrible atrocities in his name. Feeling that letting the devil commit these heinous acts was a far worse crime than any he could commit personally, he decided to perform one last vile act to seal his soul away in a phylactery and become a lich.
So the lich became reclusive, withdrawing into his wizard tower and an island that has been uninhabited since the devil wreaked havoc on it. He had stashed his soul away and become immortal explicitly to prevent the devil from being able to claim his soul upon his death, and locked himself away so he would neither bring misfortune to those who do not deserve it nor draw attention to himself and bring would-be heroes to his home to try killing him and sending his soul to the devil.

And yet, that's exactly what ended up happening. Our group caught wind of this wizard who had made a pact with our ultimate enemy, so we went to investigate.
Two of us being chaotic good said, "We're here to prevent the devil from being able to claim his soul upon his death. That's exactly why he became a lich in the first place, verbatim. He clearly despises Tigla and has gone to great lengths to try escaping his infernal pact. If we can get a cleric to cast Atonement and redeem him, he could be a powerful ally. The enemy of my enemy, as they say."
The other two, being not only lawful good but also religious zealots, said, "We won't hear of it. This twice-forsaken thing has cast away his soul twice already. Once to the devil, and again to cheat death. Even if he could be redeemed, he would still be an abomination. He must be destroyed."
The party split in half for that particular fight, and the side that wanted to kill the lich won :(